But this is Chico, too

Writing health stories for the Enterprise-Record sometimes brings me in contact with New Age ideas.

Many Chicoans are exploring them. In their quest to overcome an illness or just feel better, they embrace the exotic — from foods our mothers never fed us, to spiritual philosophies and physical regimens once confined to the part of the world that lies east of the Mediterranean sea or known only to indigenous cultures of North America.

Chico has a thriving New Age community. A recent visit by Deepak Chopra, one of its luminaries, confirms this. Why Chico is an incubator for this kind approach to life has something to do with its being a college town in a rural setting. A book called “Valley for Dreams” by Susan Hardwick and Donald Holtgrieve does a good job of explaining why Chico has attracted people it calls “seekers” over the last 35 to 40 years. (In fact, this is one of the best books about the Sacramento Valley I’ve ever read.)

In making the acquaintance of New Age believers and practitioners, I’ve become aware that they part of a common culture that even has its own language — words like holistic, chakras and auras and terms like collective consciousness and guided meditation.

The typical Chico New Ager is almost imperturbably laid-back, but there are a few cracks in the mellow persona. One of them is a skepticism, verging on hostility, toward churches and other forms of “organized religion.”

As a journalist, I’m skeptical of everything. This includes religious dogmas as well as knee-jerk negative reactions against religious dogmas. I’m similarly wary of overly reductionistic and materialistic views of life that are supposedly based on science.

Whenever I encounter New Age thinking, I try to get past its sometimes vague and silly trappings and try to find whatever kernels of truth may lie at its core. Despite an aging brain that seems increasingly inclined to resist new ideas, I still try to value the openness that characterized my outlook on life when I was younger.

And yet even as I write the word “openness,” I’m a little offended by it. It sounds rather vacuous. It smacks of the kind of New Age terminology that feeds my skepticism.